Student Work in CentreTerm 2018

Team Decision Makers: One Step From Living Or Dying

In today and a little bit of yesterday’s class time, we as a team have put in more work than ever into our storyline, creating even more pathways into our game to show the reality that one simple mistake in Nazi Germany could change your fate quickly. Also, we have figured out Twine quite well and at least know how to plug in our text and make the story flow and spread out. However, there are some things we need to figure out within these next few days to maximize the benefit of using Twine.

Over the past few days, we gradually noticed that although we are not judged on how long our game is, nor are we required to make an hour long production, our game does not take very long to play through. We still desire as a group to make little bit lengthier of a game, so we doubled down on our effort to the storyline. At this point, there is at least five separate endings, but we have 3 or more in the works that could result in victory or death based on one simple decision. Due to our production taking place in such a radical place and time in history, it is accurate that one misstep could result in life or death. People were killed frequently in Germany during World War II for misspeaking and accidently disrespecting leaders. In fascist countries, a citizens were heavily punished for showing dislike toward their leaders. As mentioned today in class, this still happens with Kim Jong-Un in North Korea today.

As said before, our focus has been on expanding the story with more decisions and details, and this affects Twine directly. Adding more detail does not change much except putting more text into the box, but adding more decisions changes a lot. More choices equals more text boxes, therefore more text and details, but most of all, more decisions makes for a really confusing “tree” on Twine. There are lot of branches running all over the place, making it challenging to keep your focus on the correct one. Some decisions make the player come back to the same place after a couple of turns, which looks very confusing to us on Twine. As we add more, these paths may run together even more and present even more visual challenges to us.

Twine’s one weakness is the lack of visual for the player, so we are continuing to investigate how we can improve upon that through pictures, sounds, and text changes. We have been looking up how to do these things but it seems pretty challenging. We are going to meet up as a group these next few nights and figure them out. Adding pictures adds the direct aspect of a visual, which is appealing to the player. I’m not sure if sounds are even possible, but if they are, sounds can provide the recognizable noise of military parades or doors opening, which once again can help make the player feel like they are in the game. Changing the text design can force a certain mood shift in scenes that are more intense, causing the consumer to feel the attitude of the game more. In the coming days, we have a lot of work to do with the storyline and plugging that into Twine. I’m confident we will figure out the additions to Twine to make our game even better. Until next time!